Mpeg-aware Disk Storage System. (august 2000)

MPEG-aware Disk Storage System. (August 2000) Qian Ren, B.S., Tsinghua University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. A.L. Narasimha Reddy In the past decades the demand for systems that can process and deliver massive amount of storage has increased. Multimedia applications such as streaming audio and video require large amounts of data to be read from disk and processed for timely delivery to the client. Large decision support data bases not only need to read large amounts of data from storage media but also require scalable processing power as the data set size grows. Increasing performance and decreasing cost of microprocessors are making it feasible to move more processing power to the data source as proposed in active disks or multiported storage devices. This allows us to investigate new methods of multimedia disk storage system that were not plausible in the past. MPEG-aware disk storage system is a disk storage system with intelligence about the MPEG formatted multimedia data. MPEG-aware disk has a powerful CPU in the disk controller. In a multimedia server with an MPEG-aware disk storage system, common functions of preprocessing MPEG data from the disk is done by the disk CPU instead of the server CPU, resulting in considerable system-level performance improvements. This allows more multimedia files to be serviced by one server. The presented prototype implementation of MPEG-aware disk storage system is built on Linux operating system.